SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



AN ESSAY ON STYLE 

WALTER PATER 



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SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 



AN ESSAY ON STYLE 



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SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 

By MATTHEW ARNOLD 

{Reprinted from "Culture and Anarchy") 
AND 

AN ESSAY ON STYLE 

By WALTER PATER 

(Reprinted from "Appreciations ") 



Ncto lorfe 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 
1899 

All rights reserved 



.St 

1393 



Copyright, 1895, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 

Copyright, 1899, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 




TW o cop. - ifcceivaa 

Nortoooti 53ifss 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






I. 

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

THE disparagers of culture make 
* its motive curiosity ; sometimes, 
indeed, they make its motive mere 
exclusiveness and vanity. The culture 
which is supposed to plume itself on 
a smattering of Greek and Latin is a 
culture which is begotten by nothing 
so intellectual as curiosity ; it is valued 
either out of sheer vanity and igno- 
rance or else as an engine of social 
and class distinction, separating its 
holder, like a badge or title, from 
other people who have not got it. No 
serious man would call this culture, or 
3 



4 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

attach any value to it, as culture, at 
all. To find the real ground for the 
very different estimate which serious 
people will set upon culture, we must 
find some motive for culture in the 
terms of which may lie a real ambi- 
guity ; and such a motive the word 
curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that 
we English do not, like the foreigners, 
use this word in a good sense as well 
as in a bad sense. With us the word 
is always used in a somewhat disap- 
proving sense. A liberal and intelli- 
gent eagerness about the things of the 
mind may be meant by a foreigner 
when he speaks of curiosity, but with 
us the word always conveys a certain 
notion of frivolous and unedifying ac- 
tivity. In the Quarterly Review, some 
little time ago, was an estimate of the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 5 

celebrated French critic, M. Sainte- 
Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate 
it in my judgment was. And its in- 
adequacy consisted chiefly in this : 
that in our English way it left out of 
sight the double sense really involved 
in the word curiosity, thinking enough 
was said to stamp M. Sainte-Beuve 
with blame if it was said that he was 
impelled in his operations as a critic 
by curiosity, and omitting either to 
perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, 
and many other people with him, 
would consider that this was praise- 
worthy and not blameworthy, or to 
point out why it ought really to be 
accounted worthy of blame and not 
of praise. For as there is a curiosity 
about intellectual matters which is 
futile, and merely a disease, so there 
is certainly a curiosity, — a desire after 



6 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

the things of the mind simply for their 
own sakes and for the pleasure of see- 
ing them as they are, — which is, in 
an intelligent being, natural and laud- 
able. Nay, and the very desire to see 
things as they are implies a balance 
and regulation of mind which is not 
often attained without fruitful effort, 
and which is the very opposite of the 
blind and diseased impulse of mind 
which is what we mean to blame when 
we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says : 
" The first motive which ought to im- 
pel us to study is the desire to aug- 
ment the excellence of our nature, and 
to render an intelligent being yet more 
intelligent." This is the true ground 
to assign for the genuine scientific pas- 
sion, however manifested, and for cul- 
ture, viewed simply as a fruit of this 
passion ; and it is a worthy ground, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 7 

even though we let the term curiosity 
stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, 
in which not solely the scientific pas- 
sion, the sheer desire to see things as 
they are, natural and proper in an in- 
telligent being, appears as the ground 
of it. There is a view in which all 
the love of our neighbour, the impulses 
towards action, help, and beneficence, 
the desire for removing human error, 
clearing human confusion, and dimin- 
ishing human misery, the noble aspi- 
ration to leave the world better and 
happier than we found it, — motives 
eminently such as are called social, — 
come in as part of the grounds of 
culture, and the main and preeminent 
part. Culture is then properly de- 
scribed not as having its origin in curi- 
osity, but as having its origin in the 



8 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

love of perfection ; it is a study of 
perfection. It moves by the force, not 
merely or primarily of the scientific 
passion for pure knowledge, but also 
of the moral and social passion for 
doing good. As, in the first view of 
it, we took for its worthy motto Mon- 
tesquieu's words : " To render an in- 
telligent being yet more intelligent ! " 
so, in the second view of it, there is 
no better motto which it can have 
than these words of Bishop Wilson : 
" To make reason and the will of God 
prevail ! " 

Only, whereas the passion for doing 
good is apt to be overhasty in deter- 
mining what reason and the will of 
God say, because its turn is for acting 
rather than thinking and it wants to 
be beginning to act ; and whereas it 
is apt to take its own conceptions 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 9 

which proceed from its own state of 
development and share in all the im- 
perfections and immaturities of this, 
for a basis of action ; what distin- 
guishes culture is, that it is possessed 
by the scientific passion as well as by 
the passion of doing good ; that it 
demands worthy notions of reason and 
the will of God, and does not readily 
suffer its own crude conceptions to 
substitute themselves for them. And 
knowing that no action or institution 
can be salutary and stable which is 
not based on reason and the will of 
God, it is not so bent on acting and 
instituting, even with the great aim of 
diminishing human error and misery 
ever before its thoughts, but that it can 
remember that acting and instituting 
are of little use, unless we know how and 
what we ought to act and to institute. 



10 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

This culture is more interesting and 
more far reaching than that other, 
which is founded solely on the scien- 
tific passion for knowing. But it needs 
times of faith and ardour, times when 
the intellectual horizon is opening and 
widening all round us, to flourish in. 
And is not the close and bounded 
intellectual horizon within which we 
have long lived and moved now lift- 
ing up, and are not new lights finding 
free passage to shine in upon us ? For 
a long time there was no passage for 
them to make their way in upon us, 
and then it was of no use to think of 
adapting the world's action to them. 
Where was the hope of making reason 
and the will of God prevail among 
people who had a routine which they 
had christened reason and the will of 
God, in which they were inextricably 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. II 

bound, and beyond which they had 
no power of looking? But now the 
iron force of adhesion to the old rou- 
tine, — social, political, religious, — 
has wonderfully yielded ; the iron 
force of exclusion of all which is new 
has wonderfully yielded. The danger 
now is, not that people should ob- 
stinately refuse to allow anything but 
their old routine to pass for reason 
and the will of God, but either that 
they should allow some novelty or 
other to pass for these too easily, or 
else that they should underrate the 
importance of them altogether, and 
think it enough to follow action for 
its own sake, without troubling them- 
selves to make reason and the will of 
God prevail therein. Now, then, is 
the moment for culture to be of ser- 
vice, culture which believes in making 



12 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

reason and the will of God prevail, 
believes in perfection, is the study and 
pursuit of perfection, and is no longer 
debarred, by a rigid, invincible exclu- 
sion of whatever is new, from getting 
acceptance for its ideas, simply be- 
cause they are new. 

The moment this view of culture is 
seized, the moment it is regarded not 
solely as the endeavour to see things 
as they are, to draw towards a know- 
ledge of the universal order which 
seems to be intended and aimed at 
in the world, and which it is a man's 
happiness to go along with or his 
misery to go counter to, — to learn, 
in short, the will of God, — the mo- 
ment, I say, culture is considered not 
merely as the endeavour to see and 
learn this, but as the endeavour, also, 
to make it prevail, the moral, social, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 1 3 

and beneficent character of culture 
becomes manifest. The mere endeav- 
our to see and learn the truth for our 
own personal satisfaction is indeed a 
commencement for making it prevail, 
a preparing the way for this, which 
always serves this, and is wrongly, 
therefore, stamped with blame abso- 
lutely in itself and not only in its cari- 
cature and degeneration. But perhaps 
it has got stamped with blame, and 
disparaged with the dubious title of 
curiosity, because in comparison with 
this wider endeavour of such great and 
plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and 
unprofitable. 

And religion, the greatest and most 
important of the efforts by which the 
human race has manifested its impulse 
to perfect itself, — religion, that voice 
of the deepest human experience, — 



14 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

does not only enjoin and sanction the 
aim which is the great aim of culture, 
the aim of setting ourselves to ascer- 
tain what perfection is and to make 
it prevail ; but also, in determining 
generally in what human perfection 
consists, religion comes to a conclu- 
sion identical with that which culture, 
— culture seeking the determination 
of this question through all the voices 
of human experience which have been 
heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, 
philosophy, history, as well as of re- 
ligion, in order to give a greater ful- 
ness and certainty to its solution, — 
likewise reaches. Religion says : The 
kingdom of God is within you; and 
culture, in like manner, places human 
perfection in an internal condition, in 
the growth and predominance of our 
humanity proper, as distinguished from 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 1 5 

our animality. It places it in the ever- 
increasing efficacy and in the general 
harmonious expansion of those gifts of 
thought and feeling which make the 
peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness 
of human nature. As I have said on 
a former occasion : " It is in making 
endless additions to itself, in the end- 
less expansion of its powers, in endless 
growth in wisdom and beauty, that the 
spirit of the human race finds its ideal. 
To reach, this ideal, culture is an indis- 
pensable aid, and that is the true value 
of culture." Not a having and a rest- 
ing, but a growing and a becoming, is 
the character of perfection as culture 
conceives it ; and here, too, it coin- 
cides with religion. 

And because men are all members 
of one great whole, and the sympathy 
which is in human nature will not allow 



1 6 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

one member to be indifferent to the 
rest or to have a perfect welfare inde- 
pendent of the rest, the expansion of 
our humanity, to suit the idea of per- 
fection which culture forms, must be 
a general expansion. Perfection, as 
culture conceives it, is not possible 
while the individual remains isolated. 
The individual is required, under pain 
of being stunted and enfeebled in his 
own development if he disobeys, to 
carry others along with him in his 
march towards perfection, to be con- 
tinually doing all he can to enlarge and 
increase the volume of the human stream 
sweeping thitherward. And here, once 
more, culture lays on us the same obliga- 
tion as religion, which says, as Bishop 
Wilson has admirably put it, that "to 
promote the kingdom of God is to in- 
crease and hasten one's own happiness." 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 1 7 

But, finally, perfection — as culture 
from a thorough disinterested study of 
human nature and human experience 
learns to conceive it — is a harmoni- 
ous expansion of all the powers which 
make the beauty and worth of human 
nature, and is not consistent with the 
over-development of any one power at 
the expense of the rest. Here culture 
goes beyond religion, as religion is 
generally conceived by us. 

If culture, then, is a study of perfec- 
tion, and of harmonious perfection, gen- 
eral perfection, and perfection which 
consists in becoming something rather 
than in having something, in an inward 
condition of the mind and spirit, not 
in an outward set of circumstances, — 
it is clear that culture, instead of being 
the frivolous and useless thing which 
Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic Harri- 



1 8 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

son, and many other liberals are apt 
to call it, has a very important func- 
tion to fulfil for mankind. And this 
function is particularly important in 
our modern world, of which the whole 
civilisation is, to a much greater de- 
gree than the civilisation of Greece 
and Rome, mechanical and external, 
and tends constantly to become more 
so. But above all in our own country 
has culture a weighty part to perform, 
because here that mechanical charac- 
ter, which civilisation tends to take 
everywhere, is shown in the most emi- 
nent degree. Indeed, nearly all the 
characters of perfection, as culture 
teaches us to fix them, meet in this 
country with some powerful tendency 
which thwarts them and sets them at 
defiance. The idea of perfection as 
an inward condition of the mind and 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 19 

spirit is at variance with the me- 
chanical and material civilisation in 
esteem with us, and nowhere, as I 
have said, so much in esteem as with 
us. The idea of perfection as a gen- 
eral expansion of the human family is 
at variance with our strong individual- 
ism, our hatred of all limits to the 
unrestrained swing of the individual's 
personality, our maxim of "every man 
for himself." Above all, the idea of 
perfection as a harmonious expansion 
of human nature is at variance with 
our want of flexibility, with our inap- 
titude for seeing more than one side 
of a thing, with our intense energetic 
absorption in the particular pursuit we 
happen to be following. So culture 
has a rough task to achieve in this 
country. Its preachers have, and are 
likely long to have, a hard time of it, 



20 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

and they will much oftener be re- 
garded, for a great while to come, as 
elegant or spurious Jeremiahs than as 
friends and benefactors. That, how- 
ever, will not prevent their doing in 
the end good service if they persevere. 
And, meanwhile, the mode of action 
they have to pursue, and the sort of 
habits they must fight against, ought 
to be made quite clear for every one to 
see, who may be willing to look at the 
matter attentively and dispassionately. 
Faith in machinery is, I said, our 
besetting danger ; often in machinery 
most absurdly disproportioned to the 
end which this machinery, if it is to 
do any good at all, is to serve ; but 
always in machinery, as if it had a 
value in and for itself. What is free- 
dom but machinery? what is popula- 
tion but machinery? what is coal but 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 21 

machinery? what are railroads but 
machinery? what is wealth but ma- 
chinery? what are, even, religious 
organisations but machinery? Now 
almost every voice in England is ac- 
customed to speak of these things as 
if they were precious ends in them- 
selves, and therefore had some of the 
characters of perfection indisputably 
joined to them. I have before now 
noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock argument 
for proving the greatness and happi- 
ness of England as she is, and for 
quite stopping the mouths of all gain- 
sayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary 
of reiterating this argument of his, so I 
do not know why I should be weary 
of noticing it. " May not every man 
in England say what he likes?" — 
Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks ; and 
that, he thinks, is quite sufficient, and 



22 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

when every man may say what he likes, 
our aspirations ought to be satisfied. 
But the aspirations of culture, which is 
the study of perfection, are not satis- 
fied, unless what men say, when they 
may say what they like, is worth saying, 
— has good in it, and more good than 
bad. In the same way the Times, 
replying to some foreign strictures on 
the dress, looks, and behaviour of the 
English abroad, urges that the English 
ideal is that every one should be free 
to do and to look just as he likes. But 
culture indefatigably tries, not to make 
what each raw person may like the 
rule by which he fashions himself, but 
to draw ever nearer to a sense of what 
is indeed beautiful, graceful, and be- 
coming, and to get the raw person to 
like that. 

And in the same way with respect 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 23 

to railroads and coal. Every one must 
have observed the strange language 
current during the late discussions as 
to the possible failures of our supplies 
of coal. Our coal, thousands of peo- 
ple were saying, is the real basis of 
our national greatness ; if our coal runs 
short, there is an end of the greatness 
of England. But what is greatness? 
— culture makes us ask. Greatness is/ 
a spiritual condition worthy to excite/ 
love, interest, and admiration ; and the 
outward proof of possessing greatness! 
is that we excite love, interest, and 
admiration. If England were swal- 
lowed up by the sea to-morrow, which 
of the two, a hundred years hence, 
would most excite the love, interest, 
and admiration of mankind, — would 
most, therefore, show the evidences of 
having possessed greatness, — the Eng- 



24 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

land of the last twenty years, or the 
England of Elizabeth, of a time of 
splendid spiritual effort, but when our 
coal, and our industrial operations de- 
pending on coal, were very little devel- 
oped? Well, then, what an unsound 
habit of mind it must be which makes 
us talk of things like coal or iron as 
constituting the greatness of England, 
and how salutary a friend is culture, 
bent on seeing things as they are, and 
thus dissipating delusions of this kind 
and fixing standards of perfection that 
are real ! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our 
prodigious works for material advan- 
tage are directed, — the commonest of 
commonplaces tells us how men are 
always apt to regard wealth as a pre- 
cious end in itself; and certainly they 
have never been so apt thus to regard 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 25 

it as they are in England at the present 
time. Never did people believe any- 
thing more firmly than nine English- 
men out of ten at the present day 
believe that our greatness and welfare 
are proved by our being so very rich. 
Now, the use of culture is that it helps 
us, by means of its spiritual standard: 
of perfection, to regard wealth as but; 
machinery, and not only to say as a- 
matter of words that we regard wealth 
as but machinery, but really to per- 
ceive and feel that it is so. If it 
were not for this purging effect wrought 
upon our minds by culture, the whole 
world, the future as well as the pres- 
ent, would inevitably belong to the 
Philistines. The people who believe 
most that our greatness and welfare 
are proved by our being very rich, 
and who most give their lives and 



26 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

thoughts to becoming rich, are just the 
very people whom we call Philistines. 
Culture says : " Consider these people, 
then, their way of life, their habits, 
their manners, the very tones of their 
voice ; look at them attentively ; ob- 
serve the literature they read, the 
things which give them pleasure, the 
words which come forth out of their 
mouths, the thoughts which make the 
furniture of their minds ; would any 
amount of wealth be worth having with 
the condition that one was to become 
just like these people by having it?" 
And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction 
which is of the highest possible value in 
stemming the common tide of men's 
thoughts in a wealthy and industrial 
community, and which saves the future, 
as one may hope, from being vulgarised, 
even if it cannot save the present. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 2J 

Population, again, and bodily health 
and vigour, are things which are no- 
where treated in such an unintelligent, 
misleading, exaggerated way as in Eng- 
land. Both are really machinery ; yet 
how many people all around us do 
we see rest in them and fail to look 
beyond them ! Why, one has heard 
people, fresh from reading certain arti- 
cles of the Times on the Registrar- 
General's returns of marriages and 
births in this country, who would talk 
of our large English families in quite 
a solemn strain, as if they had some- 
thing in itself beautiful, elevating, and 
meritorious in them ; as if the British 
Philistine would have only to present 
himself before the Great Judge with 
his twelve children, in order to be re- 
ceived among the sheep as a matter 
of right ! 



28 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

But bodily health and vigour, it may 
be said, are not to be classed with 
wealth and population as mere ma- 
chinery ; they have a more real and 
essential value. True ; but only as 
they are more intimately connected 
with a perfect spiritual condition than 
wealth or population are. The mo- 
ment we disjoin them from the idea 
of a perfect spiritual condition, and 
pursue them, as we do pursue them, 
for their own sake and as ends in 
themselves, our worship of them be- 
comes as mere worship of machinery, 
as our worship of wealth or popula- 
tion, and as unintelligent and vulgaris- 
ing a worship as that is. Every one 
with anything like an adequate idea 
of human perfection has distinctly 
marked this subordination to higher 
and spiritual ends of the cultivation of 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 2Q 

bodily vigour and activity. "Bodily 
exercise pronteth little ; but godliness 
is profitable unto all things," says the 
author of the Epistle to Timothy. And 
the utilitarian Franklin says just as ex- 
plicitly : " Eat and drink such an exact 
quantity as suits the constitution of thy 
body, in reference to the services of the 
mind." But the point of view of cul- 
ture, keeping the mark of human per- 
fection simply and broadly in view, 
and not assigning to this perfection, 
as religion or utilitarianism assigns to 
it, a special and limited character, this 
point of view, I say, of culture is best 
given by these words of Epictetus : 
" It is a sigh of d<£Wa," says he, — that 
is, of a nature not finely tempered, — 
" to give yourselves up to things which 
relate to the body ; to make, for in- 
stance, a great fuss about exercise, a 



30 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

great fuss about eating, a great fuss 
about drinking, a great fuss about 
walking, a great fuss about riding. All 
these things ought to be done merely 
by the way : the formation of the spirit 
and character must be our real con- 
cern." This is admirable ; and, in- 
deed, the Greek word ev<f>vta, a finely 
tempered nature, gives exactly the 
notion of perfection as culture brings 
us to conceive it : a harmonious per- 
fection, a perfection in which the char- 
acters of beauty and intelligence are 
both present, which unites " the two 
noblest of things," — as Swift, who of 
one of the two, at any rate, had him- 
self all too little, most happily calls 
them in his Battle of the Books, — 
" the two noblest of things, sweetness 
and light.'" The ev<f>vrj<; is the man 
who tends towards sweetness and light ; 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 3 1 

the afyvrjs, on the other hand, is our 
Philistine. The immense spiritual sig- 
nificance of the Greeks is due to their 
having been inspired with this central 
and happy idea of the essential char- 
acter of human perfection ; and Mr. 
Bright's misconception of culture, as a 
smattering of Greek and Latin, comes 
itself, after all, from this wonderful sig- 
nificance of the Greeks having affected 
the very machinery of our education, 
and is in itself a kind of homage to it. 
In thus making sweetness and light 
to be characters of perfection, culture 
is of like spirit with poetry, follows 
one law with poetry. Far more than 
on our freedom, our population, and 
our industrialism, many amongst us 
rely upon our religious organisations 
to save us. I have called religion a 
yet more important manifestation of 



32 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

human nature than poetry, because it 
has worked on a broader scale for 
perfection, and with greater masses of 
men. But the idea of beauty and of a 
human nature perfect on all its sides, 
which is the dominant idea of poetry, 
is a true and invaluable idea, though 
it has not yet had the success that the 
idea of conquering the obvious faults 
of our animality, and of a human nature 
perfect on the moral side, — which is 
the dominant idea of religion, — has 
been enabled to have ; and it is des- 
tined, adding to itself the religious idea 
of a devout energy, to transform and 
govern the other. 

The best art and poetry of the 
Greeks, in which religion and poetry 
are one, in which the idea of beauty 
and of a human nature perfect on all 
sides adds to itself a religious and de- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 33 

vout energy, and works in the strength 
of that, is on this account of such sur- 
passing interest and instructiveness for 
us, though it was, — as, having regard 
to the human race in general, and, 
indeed, having regard to the Greeks 
themselves, we must own, — a prema- 
ture attempt, an attempt which for 
success needed the moral and religious 
fibre in humanity to be more braced 
and developed than it had yet been. 
But Greece did not err in having the 
idea of beauty, harmony, and complete 
human perfection, so present and para- 
mount. It is impossible to have this 
idea too present and paramount ; only, 
the moral fibre must be braced too. 
And we, because we have braced the 
moral fibre, are not on that account 
in the right way, if at the same time 
the idea of beauty, harmony, and com- 



34 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

plete human perfection is wanting or 
misapprehended amongst us ; and evi- 
dently it is wanting or misapprehended 
at present. And when we rely as we 
do on our religious organisations, which 
in themselves do not and cannot give 
us this idea, and think we have done 
enough if we make them spread and 
prevail, then, I say, we fall into our 
common fault of overvaluing machinery. 
Nothing is more common than for 
people to confound the inward peace 
and satisfaction which follows the sub- 
duing of the obvious faults of our 
animality with what I may call abso- 
lute inward peace and satisfaction, — 
the peace and satisfaction which are 
reached as we draw near to complete 
spiritual perfection, and not merely to 
moral perfection, or rather to relative 
moral perfection. No people in the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 35 

world have done more and struggled 
more to attain this relative moral per- 
fection than our English race has. For 
no people in the world has the com- 
mand to resist the devil, to overcome 
the wicked one, in the nearest and 
most obvious sense of those words, 
had such a pressing force and reality. 
And we have had our reward, not only 
in the great worldly prosperity which 
our obedience to this command has 
brought us, but also, and far more, 
in great inward peace and satisfac- 
tion. But to me few things are more 
pathetic than to see people, on the 
strength of the inward peace and satis- 
faction which their rudimentary efforts 
towards perfection have brought them, 
employ, concerning their incomplete 
perfection and the 'religious organisa- 
tions within which they have found 



36 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

it, language which properly applies 
only to complete perfection, and is 
a far-off echo of the human soul's 
prophecy of it. Religion itself, I need 
hardly say, supplies them in abundance 
with this grand language. And very 
freely do they use it ; yet it is really 
the severest possible criticism of such 
an incomplete perfection as alone we 
have yet reached through our religious 
organisations. 

The impulse of the English race 
towards moral development and self- 
conquest has nowhere so powerfully 
manifested itself as in Puritanism. No- 
where has Puritanism found so ade- 
quate an expression as in the religious 
organisation of the Independents. The 
modern Independents have a news- 
paper, the Nonconformist, written with 
great sincerity and ability. The motto, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. yj 

the standard, the profession of faith, 
which this organ of theirs carries aloft 
is : " The Dissidence of Dissent and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant re- 
ligion." There is sweetness and light, 
and an ideal of complete harmonious 
human perfection ! One need not go 
to culture and poetry to find language 
to judge it. Religion, with its instinct 
for perfection, supplies language to 
judge it, language, too, which is in 
our mouths every day. " Finally, be 
of one mind, united in feeling," says 
St. Peter. There is an ideal which 
judges the Puritan ideal: "The Dissi- 
dence of Dissent and the Protestant- 
ism of the Protestant religion ! " And 
religious organisations like this are 
what people believe in, rest in, would 
give their lives for ! Such, I say, is 
the wonderful virtue of even the be- 



38 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

ginnings of perfection, of having con- 
quered even the plain faults of our 
animality, that the religious organisa- 
tion which has helped us to do it can 
seem to us something precious, salu- 
tary, and to be propagated, even when 
it wears such a brand of imperfection 
on its forehead as this. And men have 
got such a habit of giving to the lan- 
guage of religion a special application, 
of making it a mere jargon, that for 
the condemnation which religion itself 
passes on the shortcomings of their 
religious organisations they have no 
ear; they are sure to cheat them- 
selves and to explain this condemna- 
tion away. They can only be reached 
by the criticism which culture, like 
poetry, speaking a language not to 
be sophisticated, and resolutely testing 
these organisations by the ideal of a 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 39 

human perfection complete on all 
sides, applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it 
will be said, are again and again fail- 
ing, and failing conspicuously, in the 
necessary first stage to a harmonious 
perfection, in the subduing of the 
great obvious faults of our animality, 
which it is the glory of these religious 
organisations to have helped us to 
subdue. True, they do often so fail. 
They have often been without the vir- 
tues as well as the faults of the Puri- 
tan ; it has been one of their dangers 
that they so felt the Puritan's faults 
that they too much neglected the prac- 
tice of his virtues. I will not, how- 
ever, exculpate them at the Puritan's 
expense. They have often failed in 
morality, and morality is indispensable. 
And they have been punished for their 



40 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

failure, as the Puritan has been re- 
warded for his performance. They 
have been punished wherein they 
erred ; but their ideal of beauty, of 
sweetness and light, and a human 
nature complete on all its sides, re- 
mains the true ideal of perfection still ; 
just as the Puritan's ideal of perfec- 
tion remains narrow and inadequate, 
although for what he did well he has 
been richly rewarded. Notwithstand- 
ing the mighty results of the Pilgrim 
Fathers' voyage, they and their stand- 
ard of perfection are rightly judged 
when we figure to ourselves Shakspeare 
or Virgil, — souls in whom sweetness 
and light, and all that in human nature 
is most humane, were eminent, — ac- 
companying them on their voyage, and 
think what intolerable company Shak- 
speare and Virgil would have found 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 4 1 

them ! In the same way let us judge 
the religious organisations which we 
see all around us. Do not let us deny 
the good and the happiness which they 
have accomplished ; but do not let us 
fail to see clearly that their idea of 
human perfection is narrow and in- 
adequate, and that the Dissidence of 
Dissent and the Protestantism of the 
Protestant religion will never bring 
humanity to its true goal. As I said 
with regard to wealth : Let us look at 
the life of those who live in and for it, 
— so I say with regard to the religious 
organisations. Look at the life imaged 
in such a newspaper as the Noncon- 
formist, — a life of jealousy of the 
Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, 
openings of chapels, sermons ; and 
then think of it as an ideal of a human 
life completing itself on all sides, and 



42 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

aspiring with all its organs after sweet- 
ness, light, and perfection ! 

Another newspaper, representing, like 
the Nonconformist, one of the reli- 
gious organisations of this country, was 
a short time ago giving an account of 
the crowd at Epsom on the Derby 
day, and of all the vice and hideous- 
ness which was to be seen in that 
crowd ; and then the writer turned 
suddenly round upon Professor Hux- 
ley, and asked him how he proposed 
to cure all this vice and hideousness 
without religion. I confess I felt dis- 
posed to ask the asker this question : 
and how do you propose to cure it 
with such a religion as yours? How 
is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so 
unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, 
so far removed from a true and satis- 
fying ideal of human perfection, as is 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 43 

the life of your religious organisation 
as you yourself reflect it, to conquer 
and transform all this vice and hide- 
ousness? Indeed, the strongest plea 
for the study of perfection as pursued 
by culture, the clearest proof of the 
actual inadequacy of the idea of per- 
fection held by the religious organi- 
sations, — expressing, as I have said, 
the most widespread effort which the 
human race has yet made after perfec- 
tion, — is to be found in the state of 
our life and society with these in pos- 
session of it, and having been in pos- 
session of it I know not how many 
hundred years. We are all of us in- 
cluded in some religious organisation 
or other ; we all call ourselves, in the 
sublime and aspiring language of reli- 
gion which I have before noticed, chil- 
dren of God. Children of God ; — it 



44 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

is an immense pretension ! — and how 
are we to justify it? By the works 
which we do, and the words which we 
speak. And the work which we col- 
lective children of God do, our grand 
centre of life, our city which we have 
builded for us to dwell in, is London ! 
London, with its unutterable external 
hideousness, and with its internal can- 
ker of publice egestas, privatim opulen- 
tia, — to use the words which Sallust 
puts into Cato's mouth about Rome, 

— unequalled in the world ! The 
word, again, which we children of God 
speak, the voice which most hits our 
collective thought, the newspaper with 
the largest circulation in England, nay, 
with the largest circulation in the whole 
world, is the Daily Telegraph! I say 
that when our religious organisations, 

— which I admit to express the most 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 45 

considerable effort after perfection that 
our race has yet made, — land us in 
no better result than this, it is high 
time to examine carefully their idea 
of perfection, to see whether it does 
not leave out of account sides and 
forces of human nature which we 
might turn to great use ; whether it 
would not be more operative if it were 
more complete. And I say that the 
English reliance on our religious organ- 
isations and on their ideas of human 
perfection just as they stand, is like 
our reliance on freedom, on muscular 
Christianity, on population, on coal, on 
wealth, — mere belief in machinery, and 
unfruitful ; and that it is wholesomely 
counteracted by culture, bent on seeing 
things as they are, and on drawing the 
human race onwards to a more com- 
plete, a harmonious perfection. 



46 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

Culture, however, shows its single- 
minded love of perfection, its desire 
simply to make reason and the will of 
God prevail, its freedom from fanati- 
cism, by its attitude towards all this 
machinery, even while it insists that 
it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the 
mischief men do themselves by their 
blind belief in some machinery or 
other, — whether it is wealth and in- 
dustrialism, or whether it is the cul- 
tivation of bodily strength and activity, 
or whether it is a political organisation, 
— or whether it is a religious organi- 
sation, — oppose with might and main 
the tendency to this or that political 
and religious organisation, or to games 
and athletic exercises, or to wealth and 
industrialism, and try violently to stop 
it. But the flexibility which sweetness 
and light give, and which is one of the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 47 

rewards of culture pursued in good 
faith, enables a man to see that a ten- 
dency may be necessary, and even, as 
a preparation for something in the 
future, salutary, and yet that the gen- 
erations or individuals who obey this 
tendency are sacrificed to it, that they 
fall short of the hope of perfection by 
following it ; and that its mischiefs are 
to be criticised, lest it should take too 
firm a hold and last after it has served 
its purpose. 

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in 
a speech at Paris, — and others have 
pointed out the same thing, — how 
necessary is the present great move- 
ment towards wealth and industrialism, 
in order to lay broad foundations of 
material well-being for the society of 
the future. The worst of these justi- 
fications is that they are generally 



48 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

addressed to the very people engaged, 
body and soul, in the movement in 
question; at all events, that they are 
always seized with the greatest avidity 
by these people, and taken by them 
as quite justifying their life ; and that 
thus they tend to harden them in their 
sins. Now, culture admits the neces- 
sity of the movement towards fortune- 
making and exaggerated industrialism, 
readily allows that the future may de- 
rive benefit from it ; but insists, at the 
same time, that the passing genera- 
tions of industrialists, — forming, for 
the most part, the stout main body 
of Philistinism, — are sacrificed to it. 
In the same way, the result of all the 
games and sports which occupy the 
passing generation of boys and young 
men may be the establishment of a 
better and sounder physical type for 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 49 

the future to work with. Culture does 
not set itself against the games and 
sports ; it congratulates the future, and 
hopes it will make a good use of its 
improved physical basis ; but it points 
out that our passing generation of boys 
and young men is, meantime, sacri- 
ficed. Puritanism was perhaps neces- 
sary to develop the moral fibre of the 
English race, Nonconformity to break 
the yoke of ecclesiastical domination 
over men's minds and to prepare the 
way for freedom of thought in the 
distant future ; still, culture points out 
that the harmonious perfection of 
generations of Puritans and Noncon- 
formists have been, in consequence, 
sacrificed. Freedom of speech may 
be necessary for the society of the 
future, but the young lions of the 
Daily Telegraph in the meanwhile are 



50 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

sacrificed. A voice for every man in 
his country's government may be nec- 
essary for the society of the future, 
but meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. 
Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has 
many faults ; and she has heavily paid 
for them in defeat, in isolation, in want 
of hold upon the modern world. Yet 
we in Oxford, brought up amidst the 
beauty and sweetness of that beautiful 
place, have not failed to seize one 
truth, — the truth that beauty and 
sweetness are essential characters of a 
complete human perfection. When I 
insist on this, I am all in the faith 
and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly 
that this our sentiment for beauty and 
sweetness, our sentiment against hide- 
ousness and rawness, has been at the 
bottom of our attachment to so many 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 5 1 

beaten causes, of our opposition to so 
many triumphant movements. And 
the sentiment is true, and has never 
been wholly defeated, and has shown 
its power even in its defeat. We have 
not won our political battles, we have 
not carried our main points, we have not 
stopped our adversaries' advance, we 
have not marched victoriously with the 
modern world ; but we have told 
silently upon the mind of the country, 
we have prepared currents of feeling 
which sap our adversaries' position 
when it seems gained, we have kept 
up our own communications with the 
future. Look at the course of the 
great movement which shook Oxford 
to its centre some thirty years ago ! 
It was directed, as any one who 
reads Dr. Newman's Apology may see, 
against what in one word may be 



52 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

called " Liberalism." Liberalism pre- 
vailed ; it was the appointed force to 
do the work of the hour ; it was nec- 
essary, it was inevitable, that it should 
prevail. The Oxford movement was 
broken, it failed ; our wrecks are scat- 
tered on every shore : — 

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? 

But what was it, this liberalism, as 
Dr. Newman saw it, and as it really 
broke the Oxford movement? It was 
the great middle-class liberalism, which 
had for the cardinal points of its belief 
the Reform Bill of 1832, and local self- 
government, in politics ; in the social 
sphere, free-trade, unrestricted compe- 
tition, and the making of large indus- 
trial fortunes ; in the religious sphere, 
the Dissidence of Dissent and the 
Protestantism of the Protestant reli- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 53 

gion. I do not say that other and 
more intelligent forces than this were 
not opposed to the Oxford movement : 
but this was the force which really 
beat it ; this was the force which 
Dr. Newman felt himself fighting with ; 
this was the force which till only the 
other day seemed to be the paramount 
force in this country, and to be in 
possession of the future ; this was the 
force whose achievements fill Mr. Lowe 
with such inexpressible admiration, and 
whose rule he was so horror-struck 
to see threatened. And where is this 
great force of Philistinism now? It 
is thrust into the second rank, it is 
become a power of yesterday, it has 
lost the future. A new power has 
suddenly appeared, a power which it 
is impossible yet to judge fully, but 
which is certainly a wholly different 



54 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

force from middle-class liberalism ; dif- 
ferent in its cardinal points of belief, 
different in its tendencies in every 
sphere. It loves and admires neither 
the legislation of middle-class Parlia- 
ments, nor the local self-government 
of middle-class vestries, nor the un- 
restricted competition of middle-class 
industrialists, nor the Dissidence of 
middle-class Dissent and the Protes- 
tantism of middle-class Protestant reli- 
gion. I am not now praising this new 
force, or saying that its own ideals are 
better; all I say is that they are 
wholly different. And who will esti- 
mate how much the currents of feeling 
created by Dr. Newman's movements, 
the keen desire for beauty and sweet- 
ness which it nourished, the deep aver- 
sion it manifested to the hardness and 
vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 55 

strong light it turned on the hideous 
and grotesque illusions of middle-class 
Protestantism, — who will estimate how 
much all these contributed to swell the 
tide of secret dissatisfaction which has 
mined the ground under self-confident 
liberalism of the last thirty years, and 
has prepared the way for its sudden 
collapse and supersession? It is in 
this manner that the sentiment of 
Oxford for beauty and sweetness con- 
quers, and in this manner long may 
it continue to conquer ! 

In this manner it works to the same 
end as culture, and there is plenty of 
work for it yet to do. I have said that 
the new and more democratic force 
which is now superseding our old 
middle-class liberalism cannot yet be 
rightly judged. It has its main ten- 
dencies still to form. We hear prom- 



56 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

ises of its giving us administrative 
reform, law reform, reform of educa- 
tion, and I know not what ; but those 
promises come rather from its advo- 
cates, wishing to make a good plea 
for it and to justify it for superseding 
middle-class liberalism, than from clear 
tendencies which it has itself yet de- 
veloped. But meanwhile it has plenty 
of well-intentioned friends against whom 
culture may with advantage continue to 
uphold steadily its ideal of human per- 
fection ; that this is an inward spirit- 
ual activity, having for its cha7-acters 
increased sweetness, iticreased light, in- 
creased life, increased sympathy. Mr. 
Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, 
the world of middle-class liberalism 
and the world of democracy, but who 
brings most of his ideas from the world 
of middle-class liberalism in which he 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 57 

was bred, always inclines to inculcate 
that faith in machinery to which, as we 
have seen, Englishmen are so prone, 
and which has been the bane of mid- 
dle-class liberalism. He complains 
with a sorrowful indignation of people 
who " appear to have no proper esti- 
mate of the value of the franchise"; 
he leads his disciples to believe, — 
what the Englishman is always too 
ready to believe, — that the having a 
vote, like the having a large family, 
or a large business, or large muscles, 
has in itself some edifying and perfect- 
ing effect upon human nature. Or else 
he cries out to the democracy, — "the 
men," as he calls them, "upon whose 
shoulders the greatness of England 
rests," — he cries out to them: "See 
what you have done ! I look over this 
country and see the cities you have 



58 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

built, the railroads you have made, the 
manufactures you have produced, the 
cargoes which freight the ships of 
the greatest mercantile navy the world 
has ever seen ! I see that you have 
converted by your labours what was 
once a wilderness, these islands, into a 
fruitful garden ; I know that you have 
created this wealth, and are a nation 
whose name is a word of power through- 
out all the world." Why, this is just 
the very style of laudation with which 
Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Lowe debauches 
the minds of the middle classes, and 
makes such Philistines of them. It is 
the same fashion of teaching a man 
to value himself not on what he is, not 
on his progress in sweetness and light, 
but on the number of the railroads he 
has constructed, or the bigness of the 
tabernacle he has built. Only the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 59 

middle classes are told they have done 
it all with their energy, self-reliance, 
and capital, and the democracy are 
told they have done it all with their 
hands and sinews. But teaching the 
democracy to put its trust in achieve- 
ments of this kind is merely training 
them to be Philistines to take the 
place of the Philistines whom they are 
superseding ; and they too, like the 
middle class, will be encouraged to sit 
down at the banquet of the future 
without having on a wedding garment, 
and nothing excellent can then come 
from them. Those who know their be- 
setting faults, those who have watched 
them and listened to them, or those 
who will read the instructive account 
recently given of them by one of them- 
selves, the Journeyman Engineer, will 
agree that the idea which culture sets 



60 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

before us of perfection, — an increased 
spiritual activity, having for its char- 
acters increased sweetness, increased 
light, increased life, increased sym- 
pathy, — is an idea which the new 
democracy needs far more than the 
idea of the blessedness of the fran- 
chise or the wonderfulness of its own 
industrial performances. 

Other well-meaning friends of this 
new power are for leading it, not in the 
old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, 
but in ways which are naturally alluring 
to the feet of democracy, though in this 
country they are novel and untried 
ways. I may call them the ways of 
Jacobinism. Violent indignation with 
the past, abstract systems of renovation 
applied wholesale, a new doctrine 
drawn up in black and white for elabo- 
rating down to the very smallest details 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 6 1 

a rational society for the future, — these 
are the ways of Jacobinism. Mr. 
Frederic Harrison and other disciples 
of Comte, — one of them, Mr. Con- 
greve, is an old friend of mine, and I 
am glad to have an opportunity of 
publicly expressing my respect for his 
talents and character, — are among the 
friends of democracy who are for lead- 
ing it in paths of this kind. Mr. 
Frederic Harrison is very hostile to 
culture, and from a natural enough 
motive ; for culture is the eternal oppo- 
nent of the two things which are the 
signal marks of Jacobinism, — its fierce- 
ness, and its addiction to an abstract 
system. Culture is always assigning to 
system-makers and systems a smaller 
share in the bent of human destiny than 
their friends like. A current in people's 
minds sets towards new ideas ; people 



62 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

are dissatisfied with their old narrow 
stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon 
ideas, or any other; and some man, 
some Bentham or Comte, who has the 
real merit of having early and strongly 
felt and helped the new current, but 
who brings plenty of narrowness and 
mistakes of his own into his feeling and 
help of it, is credited with being the 
author of the whole current, the fit 
person to be entrusted with its regula- 
tion and to guide the human race. 

The excellent German historian of 
the mythology of Rome, Preller, relat- 
ing the introduction at Rome under the 
Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the 
god of light, healing, and reconciliation, 
will have us observe that it was not so 
much the Tarquins who brought to 
Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a 
current in the mind of the Roman 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 63 

people which set powerfully at that 
time towards a new worship of this 
kind, and away from the old run of 
Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a 
similar way, culture directs our atten- 
tion to the natural current there is in 
human affairs, and to its continual 
working, and will not let us rivet our 
faith upon any one man and his doings. 
It makes us see not only his good side, 
but also how much in him was of 
necessity limited and transient ; nay, it 
even feels a pleasure, a sense of an 
increased freedom and of an ampler 
future, in so doing. 

I remember, when I was under the 
influence of a mind to which I feel the 
greatest obligations, the mind of a man 
who was the very incarnation of sanity 
and clear sense, a man the most con- 
siderable, it seems to me, whom 



64 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

America has yet produced, — Benjamin 
Franklin, — I remember the relief with 
which, after long feeling the sway 
of Franklin's imperturbable common- 
sense, I came upon a project of his for 
a new version of the Book of Job, to 
replace the old version, the style of 
which, says Franklin, has become obso- 
lete, and thence less agreeable. " I 
give," he continues, "a few verses, 
which may serve as a sample of the 
kind of version I would recommend." 
We all recollect the famous verse in our 
translation : " Then Satan answered the 
Lord and said : ' Doth Job fear God 
for nought ? ' " Franklin makes this : 
" Does your Majesty imagine that Job's 
good conduct is the effect of mere per- 
sonal attachment and affection?" I 
well remember how, when first I read 
that, I drew a deep breath of relief, and 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 65 

said to myself: "After all, there is a 
stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's 
victorious good sense ! " So, after 
hearing Bentham cried loudly up as 
the renovator of modern society, and 
Bentham's mind and ideas proposed 
as the rulers of our future, I open the 
Deontology. There I read : " While 
Xenophon was writing his history and 
Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates 
and Plato were talking nonsense 
under pretence of talking wisdom and 
morality. This morality of theirs con- 
sisted in words ; this wisdom of theirs 
was the denial of matters known to 
every man's experience." From the 
moment of reading that, I am delivered 
from the bondage of Bentham ! the 
fanaticism of his adherents can touch 
me no longer. I feel the inadequacy 
of his mind and ideas for supplying 



66 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

the rule of human society, for per- 
fection. 

Culture tends always thus to deal 
with the men of a system, of disciples, 
of a school ; with men like Comte, or 
the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill. 
However much it may find to admire 
in these personages, or in some of them, 
it nevertheless remembers the text : 
" Be not ye called Rabbi ! " and it soon 
passes on from any Rabbi. But Jaco- 
binism loves a Rabbi; it does not want 
to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of 
a future and still unreached perfection ; 
it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to stand 
for perfection, that they may with the 
more authority recast the world ; and 
for Jacobinism, therefore, culture — 
eternally passing onwards and seeking 
— is an impertinence and an offence. 
But culture, just because it resists this 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 67 

tendency of Jacobinism to impose on 
us a man with limitations and errors of 
his own along with the true ideas of 
which he is the organ, really does the 
world and Jacobinism itself a service. 
So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce 
hatred of the past and of those whom 
it makes liable for the sins of the past, 
cannot away with the inexhaustible 
indulgence proper to culture, the .con- 
sideration of circumstances, the severe 
judgment of actions joined to the mer- 
ciful judgment of persons. "The man 
of culture is in politics," cries Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest 
mortals alive ! " Mr. Frederic Harrison 
wants to be doing business, and he 
complains that the man of culture stops 
him with a " turn for small fault-finding, 
love of selfish ease, and indecision in 
action." Of what use is culture, he 



68 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

asks, except for " a critic of new books 
or a professor of belles-lettres ? " Why, 
it is of use because, in presence of the 
fierce exasperation which breathes, or 
rather, I may say, hisses through the 
whole production in which Mr. Frederic 
Harrison asks that question, it reminds 
us that the perfection of human nature 
is sweetness and light. It is of use 
because, like religion, — that other 
effort after perfection, — it testifies that, 
where bitter envying and strife are, 
there is confusion and every evil work. 
The pursuit of perfection, then, is 
the pursuit of sweetness and light. 
He who works for sweetness and light, 
works to make reason and the will of 
God prevail. He who works for ma- 
chinery, he who works for hatred, 
works only for confusion. Culture 
looks beyond machinery, culture hates 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 69 

hatred ; culture has one great passion, 
the passion for sweetness and light. 
It has one even yet greater ! — the 
passion for making them prevail. It 
is not satisfied till we all come to a 
perfect man ; it knows that the sweet- 
ness and light of the few must be 
imperfect until the raw and unkindled 
masses of humanity are touched with 
sweetness and light. If I have not 
shrunk from saying that we must work 
for sweetness and light, so neither 
have I shrunk from saying that we 
must have a broad basis, must have 
sweetness and light for as many as 
possible. Again and again I have 
( insisted how those are the happy mo- 
ments of humanity, how those are the 
marking epochs of a people's life, how 
those are the flowering times for lit- 
erature and art and all the creative 



JO SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

power of genius, when there is a na- 
tional glow of life and thought, when 
the whole of society is in the fullest 
measure permeated by thought, sensi- 
ble to beauty, intelligent and alive. 
Only it must be real thought and real 
beauty ; real sweetness and real light. 
Plenty of people will try to give the 
masses, as they call them, an intel- 
lectual food prepared and adapted in 
the way they think proper for the 
actual condition of the masses. The 
ordinary popular literature is an ex- 
ample of this way of working on the 
masses. Plenty of people will try to 
indoctrinate the masses with the set 
of ideas and judgments constituting 
the creed of their own profession or 
party. Our religious and political 
organisations give an example of this 
way of working on the masses. I 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 71 

condemn neither way ; but culture 
works differently. It does not try to 
teach down to the level of inferior 
classes ; it does not try to win them 
for this or that sect of its own, with 
ready-made judgments and watch- 
words. It seeks to do away with 
classes ; to make the best that has 
been thought and known in the world 
current everywhere ; to make all men 
live in an atmosphere of sweetness and 
light, where they may use ideas, as it 
uses them itself, freely, — nourished, 
and not bound by them. 

This is the social idea; and the 
men of culture are the true apostles of 
equality. The great men of culture are 
those who have had a passion for dif- 
fusing, for making prevail, for carrying 
from one end of society to the other, 
the best knowledge, the best ideas of 



72 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

their time ; who have laboured to 
divest knowledge of all that was 
harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, pro- 
fessional, exclusive ; to humanise it, 
to make it efficient outside the clique 
of the cultivated and learned, yet still 
remaining the best knowledge and 
thought of the time, and a true 
source, therefore, of sweetness and 
light. Such a man was Abelard in 
the Middle Ages, in spite of all his 
imperfections ; and thence the bound- 
less emotion and enthusiasm which 
Abelard .excited. Such were Lessing 
and Herder in Germany, at the end 
of the last century ; and their services 
to Germany were in this way inesti- 
mably precious. Generations will pass, 
and literary monuments will accumu- 
late, and works far more perfect than 
the works of Lessing and Herder will 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. J$ 

be produced in Germany ; and yet the 
names of these two men will fill a 
German with a reverence and enthu- 
siasm such as the names of the most 
gifted masters will hardly awaken. 
And why? Because they humanised 
knowledge ; because they broadened 
the basis of life and intelligence ; be- 
cause they worked powerfully to diffuse 
sweetness and light, to make reason 
and the will of God prevail. With 
Saint Augustine they said : " Let us 
not leave thee alone to make in the 
secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst 
before the creation of the firmament, 
the division of light from darkness ; 
let the children of thy spirit, placed 
in their firmament, make their light 
shine upon the earth, mark the division 
of night and day, and announce the 
revolution of the times ; for the old 



74 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. 

order is passed, and the new arises ; the 
night is spent, the day is come forth ; 
and thou shalt crown the year with thy 
blessing, when thou shalt send forth la- 
bourers into thy harvest sown by other 
hands than theirs ; when thou shalt send 
forth new labourers to new seed-times, 
whereof the harvest shall be not yet." 



II. 

STYLE. 



II. 

STYLE. 

QINCE all progress of mind consists 
^ for the most part in differentia- 
tion, in the resolution of an obscure 
and complex object into its compo- 
nent aspects, it is surely the stupidest 
of losses to confuse things which right 
reason has put asunder, to lose the 
sense of achieved distinctions, the dis- 
tinction between poetry and prose, for 
instance, or, to speak more exactly, 
between the laws and characteristic 
excellences of verse and prose com- 
position. On the other hand, those 
who have dwelt most emphatically on 
the distinction between prose and 
77 



78 STYLE. 

verse, prose and poetry, may some- 
times have been tempted to limit the 
proper functions of prose too nar- 
rowly; and this again is at least false 
economy, as being, in effect, the re- 
nunciation of a certain means or fac- 
ulty, in a world where after all we must 
needs make the most of things. Crit- 
ical efforts to limit art a priori, by 
anticipations regarding the natural 
incapacity of the material with which 
this or that artist works, as the sculp- 
tor with solid form, or the prose- 
writer with the ordinary language of 
men, are always liable to be discred- 
ited by the facts of artistic produc- 
tion; and while prose is actually found 
to be a coloured thing with Bacon, 
picturesque with Livy and Carlyle, 
musical with Cicero and Newman, 
mystical and intimate with Plato and 



STYLE. 79 

Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, 
exalted or florid, it may be, with Mil- 
ton and Taylor, it will be useless to 
protest that it can be nothing at all, 
except something very tamely and 
narrowly confined to mainly practi- 
cal ends — a kind of "good round- 
hand;" as useless as the protest that 
poetry might not touch prosaic sub- 
jects as with Wordsworth, or an ab- 
struse matter as with Browning, or 
treat contemporary life nobly as with 
Tennyson. In subordination to one 
essential beauty in all good literary 
style, in all literature as a fine art, as 
there are many beauties of poetry so 
the beauties of prose are many, and 
it is the business of criticism to esti- 
mate them as such; as it is good in 
the criticism of verse to look for those 
hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excel- 



80 STYLE. 

lences which that too has, or needs. 
To find in the poem, amid the flowers, 
the allusions, the mixed perspectives, 
of Lycidas for instance, the thought, 
the logical structure : — how whole- 
some ! how delightful ! as to identify 
in prose what we call the poetry, the 
imaginative power, not treating it as 
out of place and a kind of vagrant 
intruder, but by way of an estimate 
of its rights, that is, of its achieved 
powers, there. 

Dryden, with the characteristic in- 
stinct of his age, loved to emphasise 
the distinction between poetry and 
prose, the protest against their con- 
fusion with each other, coming with 
somewhat diminished effect from one 
whose poetry was so prosaic. In 
truth, his sense of prosaic excellence 
affected his verse rather than his prose, 



STYLE. g I 

which is not only fervid, richly fig- 
ured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, 
all unconsciously, by many a scanning 
line. Setting up correctness, that 
humble merit of prose, as the cen- 
tral literary excellence, he is really a 
less correct writer than he may seem, 
still with an imperfect mastery of the 
relative pronoun. It might have been 
foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, 
the province of poetry in prose would 
find its assertor; and, a century after 
Dryden, amid very different intellect- 
ual needs, and with the need therefore 
of great modifications in literary form, 
the range of the poetic force in liter- 
ature was effectively enlarged by 
Wordsworth. The true distinction 
between prose and poetry he regarded 
as the almost technical or accidental 
one of the absence or presence of 



82 STYLE. 

metrical beauty, or, say! metrical re- 
straint; and for him the opposition 
came to be between verse and prose 
of course; but, as the essential dichot- 
omy in this matter, between imagi- 
native and unimaginative writing, 
parallel to De Quincey's distinction 
between " the literature of power and 
the literature of knowledge," in the 
former of which the composer gives 
us not fact, but his peculiar sense of 
fact, whether past or present. 

Dismissing then, under sanction of 
Wordsworth, that harsher opposition 
of poetry to prose, as savouring in 
fact of the arbitrary psychology of 
the last century, and with it the prej- 
udice that there can be but one only 
beauty of prose style, I propose here 
to point out certain qualities of all 
literature as a fine art, which, if they 



STYLE. 83 

apply to the literature of fact, apply 
still more to the literature of the im- 
aginative sense of fact, while they 
apply indifferently to verse and prose, 
so far as either is really imaginative — 
certain conditions of true art in both 
alike, which conditions may also con- 
tain in them the secret of the proper 
discrimination and guardianship of 
the peculiar excellences of either. 

The line between fact and some- 
thing quite different from external 
fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In 
Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive 
writers generally, how difficult to de- 
fine the point where, from time to 
time, argument which, if it is to be 
worth anything at all, must consist of 
facts or groups of facts, becomes a 
pleading — a theorem no longer, but 
essentially an appeal to the reader to 



84 STYLE. 

catch the writer's spirit, to think with 
him, if one can or will — an expres- 
sion no longer of fact but of his sense 
of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, 
prospective, or discerned below the 
faulty conditions of the present, in 
either case changed somewhat from 
the actual world. In science, on the 
other hand, in history so far as it con- 
forms to scientific rule, we have a lit- 
erary domain where the imagination 
may be thought to be always an in- 
truder. And as, in all science, the 
functions of literature reduce them- 
selves eventually to the transcribing 
of fact, so all the excellences of lit- 
erary form in regard to science are 
reducible to various kinds of painstak- 
ing; this good quality being involved 
in all "skilled work" whatever, in the 
drafting of an act of parliament, as in 



STYLE. 85 

sewing. Yet here again, the writer's 
sense of fact, in history especially, and 
in all those complex subjects which do 
but lie on the borders of science, will 
still take the place of fact, in various 
degrees. Your historian, for instance, 
with absolutely truthful intention, amid 
the multitude of facts presented to him 
must needs select, and in selecting as- 
sert something of his own humour, 
something that comes not of the world 
without but of a vision within. So 
Gibbon moulds his unwieldy material 
to a preconceived view. Livy, Taci- 
tus, Michelet, moving full of poignant 
sensibility amid the records of the 
past, each, after his own sense, mod- 
ifies — who can tell where and to what 
degree ? — and becomes something else 
than a transcriber; each, as he thus 
modifies, passing into the domain of 



86 STYLE. 

art proper. For just in proportion as 
the writer's aim, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, comes to be the transcrib- 
ing, not of the world, not of mere fact, 
but of his sense of it, he becomes an 
artist, his work fine art ; and good 
art (as I hope ultimately to show) in 
proportion to the truth of his present- 
ment of that sense ; as in those hum- 
bler or plainer functions of literature 
also, truth — truth to bare fact, there 
— is the essence of such artistic qual- 
ity as they may have. Truth ! there 
can be no merit, no craft at all, with- 
out that. And further, all beauty is 
in the long run only fineness of truth, 
or what we call expression, the finer 
accommodation of speech to that 
^vision within. 

— The transcript of his sense of fact 
rather than the fact, as being prefer- 



STYLE. 87 

able, pleasanter, more beautiful to the 
writer himself. In literature, as in 
every other product of human skill, in 
the moulding of a bell or a platter for 
instance, wherever this sense asserts 
itself, wherever the producer so mod- 
ifies his work as, over and above its 
primary use or intention, to make it 
pleasing (to himself, of course, in the 
first instance) there, "fine " as opposed 
to merely serviceable art, exists. Lit- 
erary art, that is, like all art which is 
in any way imitative or reproductive 
of fact — form, or colour, or incident 
— is the representation of such fact as 
connected with soul, of a specific per- 
sonality, in its preferences, its volition 
and power. 

Such is the matter of imaginative 
or artistic literature — this transcript, 
not of mere fact, but of fact in its infi- 



88 STYLE. 

nite variety, as modified by human 
preference in all its infinitely varied 
forms. It will be good literary art 
not because it is brilliant or sober, or 
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just 
in proportion as its representation of 
that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse 
being only one department of such lit- 
erature, and imaginative prose, it may 
be thought, being the special art of the 
modern world. That imaginative prose 
should be the special and opportune 
art of the modern world results from 
two important facts about the latter: 
first, the chaotic variety and complex- 
ity of its interests, making the intel- 
lectual issue, the really master currents 
of the present time incalculable — a 
condition of mind little susceptible of 
the restraint proper to verse form, so 
that the most characteristic verse of 



STYLE. 89 

the nineteenth century has been law- 
less verse; and secondly, an all-per- 
vading naturalism, a curiosity about 
everything whatever as it really is, in- 
volving a certain humility of attitude, 
cognate to what must, after all, be the 
less ambitious form of literature. And 
prose thus asserting itself as the special 
and privileged artistic faculty of the 
present day, will be, however critics 
may try to narrow its scope, as varied in 
its excellence as humanity itself reflect- 
ing on the facts of its latest experi- 
ence — an instrument of many stops, 
meditative, observant, descriptive, 
eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. 
Its beauties will be not exclusively 
"pedestrian": it will exert, in due 
measure, all the varied charms of 
poetry, down to the rhythm which, 
as in Cicero, or Michelet, or Newman, 



90 STYLE. 

at their best, gives its musical value 
to every syllable. 1 

The literary artist is of necessity a 
scholar, and in what he proposes to do 
will have in mind, first of all, the 
scholar and the scholarly conscience 
— the male conscience in this matter, 
as we must think it, under a system of 
education which still to so large an 
extent limits real scholarship to men. 
In his self-criticism, he supposes al- 

1 Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English 
Prose, from Malory to Macau/ay, has succeeded 
in tracing, through successive English prose- 
writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in 
them, of which this admirable scholar of our 
literature is known to be a lover. English Prose, 
from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently 
"chosen and edited" by a younger scholar, Mr. 
Arthur Galton, of New College, Oxford, a lover 
of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet, 
aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent 
powers of English prose, and is a delightful com- 
panion. 



STYLE. 91 

ways that sort of reader who will go 
(full of eyes) warily, considerately, 
though without consideration for him, 
over the ground which the female con- 
science traverses so lightly, so ami- 
ably. For the material in which he 
works is no more a creation of his own 
than the sculptor's marble. Product 
of a myriad various minds and con- 
tending tongues, compact of obscure 
and minute association, a language 
has its own abundant and often recon- 
dite laws, in the habitual and summary 
recognition of which scholarship con- 
sists. A writer, full of a matter he is 
before all things anxious to express, 
may think of those laws, the limita- 
tions of vocabulary, structure, and the 
like, as a restriction, but if a real ar- 
tist will find in them an opportunity. 
His punctilious observance of the pro- 



92 STYLE. 

prieties of his medium will diffuse 
through all he writes a general air 
of sensibility, of refined usage. Ex- 
clusiones debitcz naturce — the exclu- 
sions, or rejections, which nature 
demands — we know how large a part 
these play, according to Bacon, in the 
science of nature. In a somewhat 
changed sense, we might say that the 
art of the scholar is summed up in 
the observance of those rejections 
demanded by the nature of his me- 
dium, the material he must use. Alive 
to the value of an atmosphere in which 
every term finds its utmost degree of 
expression, and with all the jealousy 
of a lover of words, he will resist a 
constant tendency on the part of the 
majority of those who use them to 
efface the distinctions of language, the 
facility of writers often reinforcing in 



STYLE. 93 

this respect the work of the vulgar. 
He will feel the obligation not of the v 
laws only, but of those affinities, avoid- 
ances, those mere preferences, of his 
language, which through the associa- 
tions of literary history have become 
a part of its nature, prescribing the re- 
jection of many a neology, many a 
license, many a gipsy phrase which 
might present itself as actually expres- 
sive. His appeal, again, is to the 
scholar, who has great experience in 
literature, and will show no favour to 
short-cuts, or hackneyed illustration, 
or an affectation of learning designed 
for the unlearned. Hence a conten- 
tion, a sense of self-restraint and re- 
nunciation, having for the susceptible 
reader the effect of a challenge for 
minute consideration; the attention 
of the writer, in every minutest detail, 



94 STYLE. 

being a pledge that it is worth the 
reader's while to be attentive too, that 
the writer is dealing scrupulously with 
his instrument, and therefore, indi- 
rectly, with the reader himself also, 
that he has the science of the instru- 
ment he plays on, perhaps, after all, 
with a freedom which in such case will 
be the freedom of a master. 

For meanwhile, braced only by those 
restraints, he is really vindicating his 
liberty in the making of a vocabulary, 
an entire system of composition, for 
himself, his own true manner; and 
when we speak of the manner of a 
true master we mean what is essential 
in his art. Pedantry being only the 
scholarship of le cuistre (we have no 
English equivalent) he is no pedant, 
and does but show his intelligence of 
the rules of language in his freedoms 



STYLE. 95 

with it, addition or expansion, which 
like the spontaneities of manner in 
a well-bred person will still further 
illustrate good taste. — The right vo- 
cabulary! Translators have not inva- 
riably seen how all-important that is in 
the work of translation, driving for 
the most part an idiom or construc- 
tion; whereas, if the original be first- 
rate, one's first care should be with its 
elementary particles, Plato, for in- 
stance, being often reproducible by 
an exact following, with no variation 
in structure, of word after word, as 
the pencil follows a drawing under 
tracing-paper, so only each word or 
syllable be not of false colour, to 
change my illustration a little. 

Well ! that is because any writer 
worth translating at all has winnowed 
and searched through his vocabulary, 



9^ STYLE. 

is conscious of the words he would se- 
lect in systematic reading of a diction- 
ary, and still more of the words he 
would reject were the dictionary other 
than Johnson's; and doing this with 
his peculiar sense of the world ever 
in view, in search of an instrument 
for the adequate expression of that, 
he begets a vocabulary faithful to the 
colouring of his own spirit, and in the 
strictest sense original. That living 
authority which language needs lies, 
in truth, in its scholars, who recog- 
nising always that every language pos- 
sesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, 
of its own, expand at once and purify 
its very elements, which must needs 
change along with the changing 
thoughts of living people. Ninety 
years ago, for instance, great mental 
force, certainly, was needed by Words- 



STYLE. 97 

worth, to break through the conse- 
crated poetic associations of a century, 
and speak the language that was his, 
that was to become in a measure the 
language of the next generation. But 
he did it with the tact of a scholar 
also. English, for a quarter of a cent- 
ury past, has been assimilating the 
phraseology of pictorial art; for half 
a century, the phraseology of the great 
German metaphysical movement of 
eighty years ago; in part also the 
language of mystical theology: and 
none but pedants will regret a great 
consequent increase of its resources. 
For many years to come its enterprise 
may well lie in the naturalisation 
of the vocabulary of science, so only 
it be under the eye of a sensitive 
scholarship — in a liberal naturalisa- 
tion of the ideas of science too, for 



9§ STYLE. 

after all the chief stimulus of good 
style is to possess a full, rich, complex 
matter to grapple with. The literary 
artist, therefore, will be well aware 
of physical science; science also at- 
taining, in its turn, its true literary 
ideal. And then, as the scholar is 
nothing without the historic sense, he 
will be apt to restore not really obso- 
lete or really worn-out words, but the 
finer edge of words still in use : ascer- 
tain, coi?wiunicate, discover — words 
like these it has been part of our 
"business" to misuse. And still, as 
language was made for man, he will 
be no authority for correctnesses which, 
limiting freedom of utterance, were 
yet but accidents in their origin; as 
if one vowed not to say "its" which 
ought to have been in Shakspeare; 
"his" and "hers," for inanimate ob- 



STYLE. 99 

jects, being but a barbarous and really 
inexpressive survival. Yet we have 
known many things like this. Racy 
Saxon monosyllables, close to us as 
touch and sight, he will intermix 
readily with those long, savoursome, 
Latin words, rich in "second inten- 
tion." In this late day certainly, no 
critical process can be conducted 
reasonably without eclecticism. Of 
such eclecticism we have a justifying 
example in one of the first poets of our 
time. How illustrative of monosyl- 
labic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the 
phraseology of science, of metaphysic, 
of colloquialism even, are the writings 
of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, 
fastidious scholarship throughout ! 

A scholar writing for the scholarly, 
he will of course leave something to 
the willing intelligence of his reader. 



100 STYLE. 

"To go preach to the first passer-by," 
says Montaigne, "to become tutor to 
the ignorance of the first I meet, is a 
thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, nat- 
urally distressing to the scholar, who 
will therefore ever be shy of offering 
uncomplimentary assistance to the 
reader's wit. To really strenuous 
minds there is a pleasurable stimulus 
in the challenge for a continuous effort 
on their part, to be rewarded by securer 
and more intimate grasp of the author's 
sense. Self-restraint, a skilful econ- 
omy of means, ascesis, that too has a 
beauty of its own; and for the reader 
supposed there will be an aesthetic sat- 
isfaction in that frugal closeness of 
style which makes the most of a word, 
in the exaction from every sentence of 
a precise relief, in the just spacing out 
of word to thought, in the logically 



STYLE. 10 1 

rilled space connected always with the 
delightful sense of difficulty overcome. 
Different classes of persons, at dif- 
ferent times, make, of course, very 
various demands upon literature. Still, 
scholars, I suppose, and not only schol- 
ars, but all disinterested lovers of 
books, will always look to it, as to 
all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort 
of cloistral refuge, from a certain vul- 
garity in the actual world. A perfect 
poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction 
like Esmond, the perfect handling of 
a theory like Newman's Idea of a 
University, has for them something of 
the uses of a religious " retreat." Here, 
then, with a view to the central need 
of a select few, those " men of a finer 
thread " who have formed and maintain 
the literary ideal, everything, every 
component element, will have under- 



102 STYLE. 

gone exact trial, and, above all, there 
will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished 
or vulgar decoration, permissible orna- 
ment being for the most part structural, 
or necessary. As the painter in his 
picture, so the artist in his book, aims 
at the production by honourable arti- 
fice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The 
artist," says Schiller, "may be known 
rather by what he omits " / and in 
literature, too, the true artist may be 
best recognised by his tact of omis- 
sion. For to the grave reader words 
too are grave; and the ornamental 
word, the figure, the accessory form 
or colour or reference, is rarely con- 
tent to die to thought precisely at the 
right moment, but will inevitably lin- 
ger awhile, stirring a long "brain- 
wave " behind it of perhaps quite 
alien associations. 



STYLE. I03 

Just there, it may be, is the detri- 
mental tendency of the sort of schol- 
arly attentiveness of mind I am rec- 
ommending. But the true artist 
allows for it. He will remember 
that, as the very word ornament indi- 
cates what is in itself non-essential, 
so the "one beauty" of all literary 
style is of its very essence, and inde- 
pendent, in prose and verse alike, of 
all removable decoration; that it may 
exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flau- 
bert's Madame Bovary, for instance, 
or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, 
in a composition utterly unadorned, 
with hardly a single suggestion of vis- 
ibly beautiful things. Parallel, allu- 
sion, the allusive way generally, the 
flowers in the garden : — he knows the 
narcotic force of these upon the negli- 
gent intelligence to which any diver- 



104 STYLE. 

sion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant 
intruder, because one can go wander- 
ing away with it from the immediate 
subject. Jealous, if he have a really 
quickening motive within, of all that 
does not hold directly to that, of the 
facile, the otiose, he will never depart 
from the strictly pedestrian process, 
unless he gains a ponderable some- 
thing thereby. Even assured of its 
congruity, he will still question its 
serviceableness. Is it worth while, 
can we afford, to attend to just that, 
to just that figure or literary reference, 
just then? — Surplus age ! he will dread 
that, as the runner on his muscles. 
For in truth all art does but consist in 
the removal of surplusage, from the 
last finish of the gem-engraver blow- 
ing away the last particle of invisible 
dust, back to the earliest divination of 



STYLE. 105 

the finished work to be, lying some- 
where, according to Michelangelo's 
fancy, in the rough-hewn block of 
stone. 

And what applies to figure or flower 
must be understood of all other acci- 
dental or removable ornaments of 
writing whatever; and not of specific 
ornament only, but of all that latent 
colour and imagery which language as 
such carries in it. A lover of words 
for their own sake, to whom nothing 
about them is unimportant, a minute 
and constant observer of their physi- 
ognomy, he will be on the alert not 
only for obviously mixed metaphors of 
course, but for the metaphor that is 
mixed in all our speech, though a rapid 
use may involve no cognition of it. 
Currently recognising the incident, 
the colour, the physical elements or 



106 STYLE. 

particles in words like absorb, con- 
sider, extract, to take the first that 
occur, he will avail himself of them, 
as further adding to the resources of 
expression. The elementary particles 
of language will be realised as colour 
and light and shade through his schol- 
arly living in the full sense of them. 
Still opposing the constant degrada- 
tion of language by those who use it 
carelessly, he will not treat coloured 
glass as if it were clear; and while 
half the world is using figure uncon- 
sciously, will be fully aware not only 
of all that latent figurative texture in 
speech, but of the vague, lazy, half- 
formed personification — a rhetoric, 
depressing, and worse than nothing, 
because it has no really rhetorical 
motive — which plays so large a part 
there, and, as in the case of more 



STYLE. 107 

ostentatious ornament, scrupulously 
exact of it, from syllable to syllable, 
its precise value. 

So far I have been speaking of cer- 
tain conditions of the literary art aris- 
ing out of the medium or material in 
or upon which it works, the essential 
qualities of language and its aptitudes 
for contingent ornamentation, matters 
which define scholarship as science and 
good taste respectively. They are both 
subservient to a more intimate quality 
of good style : more intimate, as com- 
ing nearer to the artist himself. The 
otiose, the facile, surplusage : why are 
these abhorrent to the true literary ar- 
tist, except because, in literary as in 
all other art, structure is all-impor- 
tant, felt, or painfully missed, every- 
where ? — that architectural conception 
of work, which foresees the end in the 



Io8 STYLE. 

beginning and never loses sight of it, 
and in every part is conscious of all 
the rest, till the last sentence does 
but, with undiminished vigour, unfold 
and justify the first — a condition of 
literary art, which, in contradistinc- 
tion to another quality of the artist 
himself, to be spoken of later, I shall 
call the necessity of mind in style. 

An acute philosophical writer, the 
late Dean Mansel (a writer whose 
works illustrate the literary beauty 
there may be in closeness, and with 
obvious repression or economy of a 
fine rhetorical gift) wrote a book, of 
fascinating precision in a very obscure 
subject, to show that all the technical 
laws of logic are but means of secur- 
ing, in each and all of its apprehen- 
sions, the unity, the strict identity 
with itself, of the apprehending mind. 



STYLE. 109 

All the laws of good writing aim at a 
similar unity or identity of the mind 
in all the processes by which the word 
is associated to its import. The term 
is right, and has its essential beauty, 
when it becomes, in a manner, what it 
signifies, as with the names of simple 
sensations. To give the phrase, the 
sentence, the structural member, the 
entire composition, song, or essay, a 
similar unity with its subject and with 
itself : — style is in the right way when 
it tends towards that. All depends 
upon the original unity, the vital 
wholeness and identity, of the initia- 
tory apprehension or view. So much 
is* true of all art, which therefore 
requires always its logic, its compre- 
hensive reason — insight, foresight, 
retrospect, in simultaneous action — 
true, most of all, of the literary art, as 



IIO STYLE. 

being of all the arts most closely cog- 
nate to the abstract intelligence. Such 
logical coherency may be evidenced 
not merely in the lines of composition 
as a whole, but in the choice of a 
single word, while it by no means in- 
terferes with, but may even prescribe, 
much variety, in the building of the 
sentence for instance, or in the 
manner, argumentative, descriptive, 
discursive, of this or that part or 
member of the entire design. The 
blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a 
child's expression of its needs, may 
alternate with the long-contending, 
victoriously intricate sentence; the 
sentence, born with the integrity of a 
single word, relieving the sort of sen- 
tence in which, if you look closely, 
you can see much contrivance, much 
adjustment, to bring a highly quali- 



STYLE. 1 1 I 

fied matter into compass at one view. 
For the literary architecture, if it is 
to be rich and expressive, involves 
not only foresight of the end in the 
beginning, but also development or 
growth of design, in the process of 
execution, with many irregularities, 
surprises, and afterthoughts; the con- 
tingent as well as the necessary being 
subsumed under the unity of the whole. 
As truly, to the lack of such archi- 
tectural design, of a single, almost vis- 
ual, image, vigorously informing an 
entire, perhaps very intricate, com- 
position, which shall be austere, ornate, 
argumentative, fanciful, yet true from 
first to last to that vision within, may 
be attributed those weaknesses of con- 
scious or unconscious repetition of 
word, phrase, motive, or member of 
the whole matter, indicating, as Flau- 



1 1 2 STYLE. 

bert was aware, an original structure 
in thought not organically complete. 
With such foresight, the actual con- 
clusion will most often get itself writ- 
ten out of hand, before, in the more 
obvious sense, the work is finished. 
With some strong and leading sense 
of the world, the tight hold of which 
secures true composition and not mere 
loose accretion, the literary artist, I 
suppose, goes on considerately, set- 
ting joint to joint, sustained by yet 
restraining the productive ardour, re- 
tracing the negligences of his first 
sketch, repeating his steps only that he 
may give the reader a sense of secure 
and restful progress, readjusting mere 
assonances even, that they may soothe 
the reader, or at least not interrupt him 
on his way; and then, somewhere be- 
fore the end comes, is burdened, in- 



STYLE. 113 

spired, with his conclusion, and be- 
times delivered of it, leaving off, not 
in weariness and because he finds him- 
self at an end, but in all the freshness 
of volition. His work now structurally 
complete, with all the accumulating 
effect of secondary shades of mean- 
ing, he finishes the whole up to the 
just proportion of that ante-penulti- 
mate conclusion, and all becomes ex- 
pressive. The house he has built is 
rather a body he has informed. And so 
it happens, to its greater credit, that 
the better interest even of a narrative 
to be recounted, a story to be told, will 
often be in its second reading. And 
though there are instances of great 
writers who have been no artists, an 
unconscious tact sometimes directing 
work in which we may detect, very 
pleasurably, many of the effects of con- 



114 STYLE. 

scious art, yet one of the greatest pleas- 
ures of really good prose literature is 
in the critical tracing out of that con- 
scious artistic structure, and the per- 
vading sense of it as we read. Yet 
of poetic literature too; for, in truth, 
the kind of constructive intelligence 
here supposed is one of the forms of 
the imagination. 

That is the special function of mind, 
in style. Mind and soul : — hard to 
ascertain philosophically, the distinc- 
tion is real enough practically, for 
they often interfere, are sometimes in 
conflict, with each other. Blake, in 
the last century, is an instance of pre- 
ponderating soul, embarrassed, at a 
loss, in an area of preponderating 
mind. As a quality of style, at all 
events, soul is a fact, in certain writers 
— the way they have of absorbing 



STYLE. 1 1 5 

language, of attracting it into the 
peculiar spirit they are of, with a 
subtlety which makes the actual 
result seem like some inexplicable 
inspiration. By mind, the literary 
artist reaches us, through static and 
objective indications of design in his 
work, legible to all. By soul, he 
reaches us, somewhat capriciously 
perhaps, one and not another, through 
vagrant sympathy and a kind of imme- 
diate contact. Mind we cannot choose 
but approve where we recognise it; 
soul may repel us, not because we 
misunderstand it. The way in which 
theological interests sometimes avail 
themselves of language is perhaps 
the best illustration of the force I 
mean to indicate generally in liter- 
ature, by the word soul. Ardent relig- 
ious persuasion may exist, may make 



Il6 STYLE. 

its way, without finding any equiva- 
lent heat in language : or, again, it 
may enkindle words to various de- 
grees, and when it really takes hold 
of them doubles its force. Religious 
history presents many remarkable in- 
stances in which, through no mere 
phrase- worship, an unconscious liter- 
ary tact has, for the sensitive, laid 
open a privileged pathway from one 
to another. "The altar-fire," people 
say, "has touched those lips!" The 
Vulgate, the English Bible, the Eng- 
lish Prayer-Book, the writings of 
Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times : 
— there, we have instances of widely 
different and largely diffused phases 
of religious feeling in operation as 
soul in style. But something of the 
same kind acts with similar power in 
certain writers of quite other than 



STYLE. I I 7 

theological literature, on behalf of 
some wholly personal and peculiar 
sense of theirs. Most easily illus- 
trated by theological literature, this 
quality lends to profane writers a 
kind of religious influence. At 
their best, these writers become, as 
we say sometimes, "prophets"; such 
character depending on the effect not 
merely of their matter, but of their mat- 
ter as allied to, in "electric affinity" 
with, peculiar form, and working in 
all cases by an immediate sympathetic 
contact, on which account it is that 
it may be called soul, as opposed to 
mind, in style. And this too is a fac- 
ulty of choosing and rejecting what 
is congruous or otherwise, with a drift 
towards unity — unity of atmosphere 
here, as there of design — soul secur- 
ing colour (or perfume, might we 



I 1 8 STYLE. 

say?) as mind secures form, the latter 
being essentially finite, the former 
vague or infinite, as the influence of 
a living person is practically infinite. 
There are some to whom nothing has 
any real interest, or real meaning, 
except as operative in a given person ; 
and it is they who best appreciate the 
quality of soul in literary art. They 
seem to know a person, in a book, 
and make way by intuition : yet, al- 
though they thus enjoy the complete- 
ness of a personal information, it is 
still a characteristic of soul, in this 
sense of the word, that it does but 
suggest what can never be uttered, not 
as being different from, or more ob- 
scure than, what actually gets said, but 
as containing that plenary substance 
of which there is only one phase or 
facet in what is there expressed. 



STYLE. 119 

If all high things have their martyrs, 
Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank 
as the martyr of literary style. In his 
printed correspondence, a curious 
series of letters, written in his 
twenty-fifth year, records what seems 
to have been his one other passion — 
a series of letters which, with its fine 
casuistries, its firmly repressed an- 
guish, its tone of harmonious grey, 
and the sense of disillusion in which 
the whole matter ends, might have 
been, a few slight changes supposed, 
one of his own fictions. Writing to 
Madame X. certainly he does display, 
by " taking thought" mainly, by con- 
stant and delicate pondering, as in his 
love for literature, a heart really moved, 
but still more, and as the pledge of that 
motion, a loyalty to his work. Ma- 
dame X., too, is a literary artist, and the 



1 20 STYLE. 

best gifts he can send her are precepts 
of perfection in art, counsels for the 
effectual pursuit of that better love. 
In his love-letters it is the pains and 
pleasures of art he insists on, its sol- 
aces : he communicates secrets, re- 
proves, encourages, with a view to 
that. Whether the lady was dissatis- 
fied with such divided or indirect 
service, the reader is not enabled to 
see; but sees that, on Flaubert's part 
at least, a living person could be no 
rival of what was, from first to last, 
his leading passion, a somewhat soli- 
tary and exclusive one. 

" I must scold you," he writes, " for one 
thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the small 
concern, namely, you show for art just now. As 
regards glory be it so : there, I approve. But 
for art ! — the one thing in life that is good 
and real — can you compare with it an earthly 
love? — prefer the adoration of a relative 



STYLE. 121 

beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? 
Well ! I tell you the truth. That is the one 
thing good in me • the one thing I have, to 
me estimable. For yourself, you blend with 
the beautiful a heap of alien things, the use- 
ful, the agreeable, what not? — 

"The only way not to be unhappy is to 
shut yourself up in art, and count everything 
else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all 
beside when it is established on a large basis. 
Work ! God wills it. That, it seems to me, is 
clear. — 

" I am reading over again the sEneid, cer- 
tain verses of which I repeat to myself to 
satiety. There are phrases there which stay 
in one's head, by which I find myself beset, 
as with those musical airs which are for ever 
returning, and cause you pain, you love them 
so much. I observe that I no longer laugh 
much, and am no longer depressed. I am 
ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy me. 
It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the 
prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I 
continue my labour like a true working-man, 
who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his 
brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling 



122 STYLE. 

himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or 
thunder. I was not like that formerly. The 
change has taken place naturally, though my 
will has counted for something in the matter. — 
" Those who write in good style are some- 
times accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the 
moral end, as if the end of the physician were 
something else than healing, of the painter 
than painting — as if the end of art were not, 
before all else, the beautiful." 

What, then, did Flaubert under- 
stand by beauty, in the art he pur- 
sued with so much fervour, with so 
much self-command? Let us hear a 
sympathetic commentator: — 

" Possessed of an absolute belief that there 
exists but one way of expressing one thing, 
one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, 
one verb to animate it, he gave himself to 
superhuman labour for the discovery, in every 
phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. 
In this way, he believed in some mysterious 
harmony of expression, and when a true word 
seemed to him to lack euphony still went 



STYLE. 123 

on seeking another, with invincible patience, 
certain that he had not yet got hold of the 
unique word. ... A thousand preoccupations 
would beset him at the same moment, always 
with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit : 
Among all the expressions in the world, all 
forms and turns of expression, there is but one 
— one form, one mode — to express what I 
want to say." 

The one word for the one thing, the 
one thought, amid the multitude of 
words, terms, that might just do : the 
problem of style was there ! — the 
unique word, phrase, sentence, para- 
graph, essay, or song, absolutely proper 
to the single mental presentation or 
vision within. In that perfect justice, 
overand above the many contingent and 
removable beauties with which beauti- 
ful style may charm us, but which it 
can exist without, independent of them 
yet dexterously availing itself of them, 



124 STYLE. 

omnipresent in good work, in function 
at every point, from single epithets to 
the rhythm of a whole book, lay the 
specific, indispensable, very intellect- 
ual, beauty of literature, the possibil- 
ity of which constitutes it a fine art. 

One seems to detect the influence 
of a philosophic idea there, the idea 
of a natural economy, of some pre- 
existent adaptation, between a rela- 
tive, somewhere in the world of 
thought, and its correlative, some- 
where in the world of language — 
both alike, rather, somewhere in the 
mind of the artist, desiderative, ex- 
pectant, inventive — meeting each 
other with the readiness of "soul 
and body reunited," in Blake's rapt- 
urous design; and, in fact, Flaubert 
was fond of giving his theory philo- 
sophical expression. — 



STYLE. I25 

' There are no beautiful thoughts," he would 
say, " without beautiful forms, and conversely. 
As it is impossible to extract from a physical 
body the qualities which really constitute it 
— colour, extension, and the like — without 
reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, 
without destroying it ; just so it is impossible 
to detach the form from the idea, for the idea 
only exists by virtue of the form." 

All the recognised flowers, the re- 
movable ornaments of literature (in- 
cluding harmony and ease in reading 
aloud, very carefully considered by 
him) counted certainly; for these too 
are part of the actual value of what 
one says. But still, after all, with 
Flaubert, the search, the unwearied 
research, was not for the smooth, or 
winsome, or forcible word, as such, 
as with false Ciceronians, but quite 
simply and honestly, for the world's 
adjustment to its meaning. The first 



1 26 STYLE. 

condition of this must be, of course, to 
know yourself, to have ascertained 
your own sense exactly. Then, if we 
suppose an artist, he says to the reader, 
— I want you to see precisely what 
I see. Into the mind sensitive to 
"form," a flood of random sounds, 
colours, incidents, is ever penetrating 
from the world without, to become, 
by sympathetic selection, a part of its 
very structure, and, in turn, the vis- 
ible vesture and expression of that 
other world it sees so steadily within, 
nay, already with a partial conformity 
thereto, to be refined, enlarged, cor- 
rected, at a hundred points; and it is 
just there, just at those doubtful points 
that the function of style, as tact or 
taste, intervenes. The unique term 
will come more quickly to one than 
another, at one time than another, 



STYLE. 127 

according also to the kind of matter 
in question. Quickness and slowness, 
ease and closeness alike, have nothing 
to do with the artistic character of the 
true word found at last. As there is a 
charm of ease, so there is also a spe- 
cial charm in the signs of discovery, of 
effort and contention towards a due 
end, as so often with Flaubert himself 
— in the style which has been pliant, 
as any obstinate, durable metal can be, 
to the inherent perplexities and recu- 
sancy of a certain difficult thought. 

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps 
we should never have guessed how 
tardy and painful his own procedure 
really was, and after reading his con- 
fession may think that his almost end- 
less hesitation had much to do with 
diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the 
felicity supposed will be the product 



128 STYLE. 

of a happier, a more exuberant nature 
than Flaubert's. Aggravated, certainly, 
by a morbid physical condition, that 
anxiety in " seeking the phrase," which 
gathered all the other small ennuis of 
a really quiet existence, into a kind of 
battle, was connected with his lifelong 
contention against facile poetry, facile 
art — art, facile and flimsy; and what 
constitutes the true artist is not the 
slowness or quickness of the process, 
but the absolute success of the result. 
As with those labourers in the parable, 
the prize is independent of the mere 
length of the actual day's work. " You 
talk," he writes, odd, trying lover, to 
Madame X. — 

" You talk of the exclusiveness of my liter- 
ary tastes. That might have enabled you to 
divine what kind of a person I am in the 
matter of love. I grow so hard to please as a 



STYLE. I29 

literary artist, that I am driven to despair. 
I shall end by not writing another line." 

"Happy," he cries, in a moment of 
discouragement at that patient labour, 
which for him, certainly, was the con- 
dition of a great success — 

" Happy those who have no doubts of 
themselves ! who lengthen out, as the pen runs 
on, all that flows forth from their brains. 
As for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, 
turn round upon myself in despite : my taste 
is augmented in proportion as my natural 
vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over 
some dubious word out of all proportion to 
the pleasure I get from a whole page of good 
writing. One would have to live two centuries 
to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. 
What Buffon said is a big blasphemy : genius 
is not long-continued patience. Still, there is 
some truth in the statement, and more than 
people think, especially as regards our own 
day. Art ! art ! art ! bitter deception ! phan- 
tom that glows with light, only to lead one on 
to destruction." 



I30 STYLE. 

Again — 

" I am growing so peevish about my writ- 
ing. I am like a man whose ear is true but 
who plays falsely on the violin : his fingers 
refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of 
which he has the inward sense. Then the 
tears come rolling down from the poor scrap- 
er's eyes and the bow falls from his hand." 

Coming slowly or quickly, when it 
comes, as it came with so much labour 
of mind, but also with so much lustre, 
to Gustave Flaubert, this discovery of 
the word will be, like all artistic suc- 
cess and felicity, incapable of strict 
analysis: effect of an intuitive condi- 
tion of mind, it must be recognised 
by like intuition on the part of the 
reader, and a sort of immediate sense. 
In every one of those masterly sen- 
tences of Flaubert there was, below all 
mere contrivance, shaping and after- 



STYLE. 1 3 1 

thought, by some happy instantaneous 
concourse of the various faculties of 
the mind with each other, the exact 
apprehension of what was needed to 
carry the meaning. And that it fits 
with absolute justice will be a judg- 
ment of immediate sense in the appre- 
ciative reader. We all feel this in 
what may be called inspired transla- 
tion. Well ! all language involves 
translation from inward to outward. 
In literature, as in all forms of art, 
there are the absolute and the merely 
relative or accessory beauties; and 
precisely in that exact proportion of 
the term to its purpose is the absolute 
beauty of style, prose or verse. All 
the good qualities, the beauties, of 
verse also, are such, only as precise 
expression. 

In the highest as in the lowliest lit- 



I32 STYLE. 

erature, then, the one indispensable 
beauty is, after all, truth: — truth to 
bare fact in the latter, as to some per- 
sonal sense of fact, diverted somewhat 
from men's ordinary sense of it, in the 
former; truth there as accuracy, truth 
here as expression, that finest and most 
intimate form of truth, the vraie verite. 
And what an eclectic principle this 
really is! employing for its one sole 
purpose — that absolute accordance of 
expression to idea — ■ all other literary 
beauties and excellences whatever: 
how many kinds of style it covers, 
explains, justifies, and at the same 
time safeguards! Scott's facility, 
Flaubert's deeply pondered evoca- 
tion of "the phrase," are equally 
good art. Say what you have to say, 
what you have a will to say, in the 
simplest, the most direct and exact 



STYLE. 133 

manner possible, with no surplusage : 
— there, is the justification of the sen- 
tence so fortunately born, "entire, 
smooth, and round," that it needs no 
punctuation, and also (that is the 
point!) of the most elaborate period, 
if it be right in its elaboration. Here 
is the office of ornament: here also 
the purpose of restraint in ornament. 
As the exponent of truth, that austerity 
(the beauty, the function, of which in 
literature Flaubert understood so well) 
becomes not the correctness or purism 
of the mere scholar, but a security 
against the otiose, a jealous exclusion 
of what does not really tell towards the 
pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in 
the portraiture of one's sense. Li- 
cense again, the making free with rule, 
if it be indeed, as people fancy, a 
habit of genius, flinging aside or 



134 STYLE. 

transforming all that opposes the lib- 
erty of beautiful production, will be 
but faith to one's own meaning. The 
seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le 
Noir is nothing in itself; the wild 
ornament of Les Miserables is nothing 
in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, 
amid a real natural opulence, only re- 
doubled beauty — the phrase so large 
and so precise at the same time, hard 
as bronze, in service to the more per- 
fect adaptation of words to their mat- 
ter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, 
will be of profit only so far as they too 
really serve to bring out the original, 
initiative, generative, sense in them. 

In this way, according to the well- 
known saying, "The style is the man,'' 
complex or simple, in his individu- 
ality, his plenary sense of what he 
really has to say, his sense of the 



STYLE. I35 

world; all cautions regarding style 
arising out of so many natural scru- 
ples as to the medium through which 
alone he can expose that inward sense 
of things, the purity of this medium, 
its laws or tricks of refraction : noth- 
ing is to be left there which might 
give conveyance to any matter save 
that. Style in all its varieties, re- 
served or opulent, terse, abundant, 
musical, stimulant, academic, so long 
as each is really characteristic or ex- 
pressive, finds thus its justification, 
the sumptuous good taste of Cicero 
being as truly the man himself, and 
not another, justified, yet insured in- 
alienably to him, thereby, as would 
have been his portrait by Raffaelle, 
in full consular splendour, on his 
ivory chair. 

A relegation, you may say perhaps 



I36 STYLE. 

— a relegation of style to the subjec 
tivity, the mere caprice, of the indi- 
vidual, which must soon transform it 
into mannerism. Not so ! since there 
is, under the conditions supposed, for 
those elements of the man, for every 
lineament of the vision within, the one 
word, the one acceptable word, recog- 
nisable by the sensitive, by others " who 
have intelligence " in the matter, as 
absolutely as ever anything can be in 
the evanescent and delicate region of 
human language. The style, the man- 
ner, would be the man, not in his 
unreasoned and really uncharacteristic 
caprices, involuntary or affected, but 
in absolutely sincere apprehension of 
what is most real to him. But let us 
hear our French guide again. — 

" Styles," says Flaubert's commentator, 
"Styles, as so many peculiar moulds, each of 



STYLE. I37 

which bears the mark of a particular writer, 
who is to pour into it the whole content of 
his ideas, were no part of his theory. What 
he believed in was Style : that is to say, a 
certain absolute and unique manner of ex- 
pressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. 
For him the form was the work itself. As 
in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the 
body, determines its very contour and exter- 
nal aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, 
the basis, in a work of art, imposed, neces- 
sarily, the unique, the just expression, the 
measure, the rhythm — the form in all its 
characteristics.'' 

If the style be the man, in all the 
colour and intensity of a veritable 
apprehension, it will be in a real 
sense "impersonal." 

I said, thinking of books like Victor 
Hugo's Les Miserabks, that prose lit- 
erature was the characteristic art of the 
nineteenth century, as others, thinking 
of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, 



I38 STYLE. 

have assigned that place to music. 
Music and prose literature are, in 
one sense, the opposite terms of art; 
the art of literature presenting to the 
imagination, through the intelligence, 
a range of interests, as free and various 
as those which music presents to it 
through sense. And certainly the 
tendency of what has been here said 
is to bring literature too under those 
conditions, by conformity to which 
music takes rank as the typically per- 
fect art: If music be the ideal of all 
art whatever, precisely because in 
music it is impossible to distinguish 
the form from the substance or mat- 
ter, the subject from the expression, 
then, literature, by finding its specific 
excellence in the absolute correspond- 
ence of the term to its import, will 
be but fulfilling the condition of all 



STYLE. 139 

artistic quality in things everywhere, 
of all good art. 

Good art, but not necessarily great 
art; the distinction between great art 
and good art depending immediately, 
as regards literature at all events, not 
on its form, but on the matter. Thack- 
eray's Esmond, surely, is greater art 
than Vanity Fair, by the greater dig- 
nity of its interests. It is on the 
quality of the matter it informs or 
controls, its compass, its variety, its 
alliance to great ends, or the depth of 
the note of revolt, or the largeness of 
hope in it, that the greatness of liter- 
ary art depends, as The Divine Com- 
edy, Paradise Lost, Les Mis e rabies, 
The English Bible, are great art. 
Given the conditions I have tried to 
explain as constituting good art ; — 
then, if it be devoted further to the 



140 



STYLE. 



increase of men's happiness, to the 
redemption of the oppressed, or 
the enlargement of our sympathies 
with each other, or to such present- 
ment of new or old truth about our- 
selves and our relation to the world 
as may ennoble and fortify us in our 
sojourn here, or immediately, as with 
Dante, to the glory of God, it will be 
also great art; if, over and above those 
qualities I summed up as mind and 
soul — that colour and mystic per- 
fume, and that reasonable structure, 
it has something of the soul of human- 
ity in it, and finds its logical, its ar- 
chitectural place, in the great structure 
of human life. 



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